Legal Research

It’s Alive. It’s Aliiiiiiiiive!

Elinor Mills is reporting that the Conficker worm has come to life, a week late:

“The Conficker worm is finally doing something — updating via peer-to-peer between infected computers and dropping a mystery payload on infected computers, Trend Micro said on Wednesday. Researchers were analyzing the code of the software that is being dropped onto infected computers but suspect that it is a keystroke logger or some other program designed to steal sensitive data off the machine, said David Perry, global director of security education at Trend Micro. The software appeared to be a .sys component hiding behind a rootkit, which is software that is designed to hide the fact that a computer has been compromised, according to Trend Micro. The software is heavily encrypted, which makes code analysis difficult, the researchers said.”

Conficker is apparently designed to cease on May 1:

“‘After May 3, it shuts down and won’t do any replication,’ Perry said. ‘However, infected computers could still be remotely controlled to do something else’, he added.”

Well that’ll make for more blog posts, won’t it?

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on April 09, 2009 (boomark / email).